When I have someone come to my office to help develop a game plan to get out of debt, always ask the same question. Tell me about your debt. Tell me your interest rates, your payments and your balances. You know, the majority of the time they can tell me and I understand why so few understand the extent that they are in debt, much of the time, we don't want to know, so we just ignore it. It's human nature kicking into defense mode, you have to know the details for two reasons. First, it is impossible to set up your own debt consolidation plan without the details.

Second, it helps you accept reality, we have a tendency to ignore the problem if we can just you know, make that minimum payment, you need to be very intimate with what you have in front of you. So let's create a debt inventory. This particular course I got to talk about, get you prepared, get under the process. So there's some tools that the process is going to talk about in the very first one is the dead inventory. I find when I talk to people about their credit card situations that I'll ask the question. So how much debt do you have?

What are your interest rates? What are your payments, and they have no idea. Now, I don't fault people for that, or that's not to be critical, because I get it. You know, it's one of those things where you're not happy you're in debt, the debts causing stress of all types. And you'll want to ignore it, you just want to make the, you know, you want to be thankful to make the minimum payments, and just pretend it's not there. So it's no, no doubt that people really probably don't know the numbers.

But we got to, we got to have the details, we got to have the numbers in order to to apply what I'm going to teach you and coach you on throughout this program. Without that this is kind of a useless process. So we want to sit down, we want to look at, you know, the creditor, the account number, the telephone number, the amount of debt, the interest rate, I say variable or fixed most, most interest rates today, are variable based, and the payment amount, and this is really important, and you'll see This as we talk about some of the strategies is that current is the dead late by 60 days, is it possible to get the debt current? Again, we'll talk about this and what to do without this data. It's really tough to apply the strategies and the principles that I talked about on this coaching program here in printing money University.

We also want to know if it's if the debt has gone to collections. Now remember, as I talked about, on the debt, the course on debt collectors, is that it could be in house collections. Or it could be third party debt collector. And it's important to know which one is which. So we've got to get all this information together. Because basically, what you're going to do if, if the debt is not all current, then you're going to have to approach each debt, individually, kind of its own strategy, which we'll talk about that now.

Make sure you're very equipped to do that. So this is the first thing that we want to do that debt inventory and You know, it's one of those if you're thinking to yourself, deep down inside, I really don't want to know, you got to face this and make sure that you get this information, make sure that you have it so we can get you out of debt once and for all. This is about creating hope, not about creating fear, we're going to get you out of debt. The next thing that you need is credit monitoring. Now, I would suggest that you need credit monitoring, everybody needs credit monitoring, because of the fact that identity theft is such a problem. It's not.

If you become a an identity theft victim, it's when you become one, because it's just so rampant. But for the debt elimination process, we've got to have credit monitoring because you've got to know what's going on those credit reports. So this is really how it works. if anything changes on your credit report, you are notified. So you want a good service. And so the things that you want to consider are, does it monitor all three credit reports.

You want to make sure that it takes care of everything. The ability to get A three in one credit report at any time. Now, why is that important? That's important because most of these services will allow you to see one credit report what's on it anytime you want to, you can refresh it, you can check it used to, you could get a service and you can see all three, they don't do that anymore because of the cost. So now you can only really see one, and you might get a notification that on the one you can't see that something has changed. And so you want the ability to go order a three in one credit report, so you can see exactly what you're up against.

And that's important, I think, to have a part of the service. The bill, the ability to see at least one credit report anytime I've talked about that, the ability to update your score, cuz here's the thing, and we'll talk about this a lot is that as you get out of debt, the credit score goes up. And as the credit score goes up, you have additional options at lower interest rates, and the whole name of the game is to get the lowest Interest Rate possible the best interest rate, that is the cost of debt. So you want the ability to update your score you will be able to take to watch it in to make in to see it increase. And then there's identity theft insurance. I don't think it's that big of a deal.

Some, some companies put a big premium on it. But no this, the bigger the identity theft insurance. And obviously, this would be the case that the more it's going to cost, so I don't really don't think that it's worth it. But you can check that out as a part of the service. The next couple of tools, accountability partner. Now, the ideal accounting accountability partner would be your spouse.

I understand and get the fact that that is sometimes impossible because money is a toxic or can be a toxic issue, especially debt when it comes to relationships. But that's i that is the the I think the perfect accountability accountability partner. If not get a close friend, you know, because it's important to be able to talk about it. It's simple. To be able to let it out in the open, because here's what ends up ends up happening. I believe we all have a closet, in our financial lives.

And it's a if you open up that door, it's a dark room. And that's where we shove all the things we don't want anybody to know about. And we will we keep that that door locked shut in, nobody can get into it. I think it's important to say, Hey, you know, this is what I did. This is what happened, not proud of it. But this is what happened.

And now I'm taking the positive steps in this season, to get out of debt once and for all. And so you have that accountability partner they can, they can help you process through some of this and what's very invaluable about accountability partners simply that as you meet with them, they want to see your progress. So you've got to track your progress, which you should be doing anyway. not ignoring it, but tracking it. And so that accountability car partner can really be useful I think for you. The next thing is a goal and reward system.

I'm a very, very big advocate of setting a goal. Once you've achieved that goal along the way, that you reward yourself financially, you go buy yourself something, you go, maybe go out when even whatever you have not been doing, you reward yourself with a financial reward of some type. I think that that keeps things interesting. I think that keeps you working towards something. And it might be that you get to the point you achieve the goal and achieving the goal is the reward. If that's the case, then that extra money you're going to spend, you take it in you pay down more debt.

I'll tell you this, and this is when counseling people once you get on this process, and once you put these strategies into effect, and you see the progress, you want them more and more and more that progress, and you just got to get to focus on what it's going to be like at the point that you get to the other end of this and you're debt free, amazing feeling. You know what I'm hoping for everybody that's taking this course